Looking Awry
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
5. Secondary
Readings
Slavoj
Žižek. “The Real and its Vicissitudes” and “The Obscene
Object of Postmodernity” in Looking
Awry.
Supporting References:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek
- Žižek, Slavoj. “Looking Awry.” October , Vol. 50, (Autumn, 1989), pp. 30-55 The MIT Press
Article Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/778856
- Buchanan, Ian. "Žižek, Slavoj." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 19 Aug. 2013
The following touches on
the author primarily and not the text.
“Žižek, Slavoj (1949–). SlovenianMarxist
philosopher and psychoanalyst.
Known for his uncanny ability to connect critical
theory and popular culture in a way that is
both humorous and thought-provoking, Žižek is one of the most high
profile intellectuals in the world. An incredibly prolific and
wide-ranging author, his work is much in demand and he writes for a
variety of publications, from newspapers like The Guardian
(UK) and London Review of Books, to blogs and academic
journals. Working in several languages, it is one of Žižek's great
gifts that he is almost always able to give near instantaneous
counter-intuitive critical responses to world events. Having made the
perverse counter-claim into something of a personal trademark, he can
be relied on to say the opposite of what everyone else is saying.
Žižek is not without his critics or his faults, but is widely
regarded as an essential voice of dissidence.
Žižek was born in Ljubljana in what
was Communist Yugoslavia but is now the capital of Slovenia, into a
middle-class family. He studied philosophy and sociology at the
University of Ljubljana and in 1971 gained a position there as an
assistant researcher. Although Yugoslavia was comparatively liberal
for a socialist country, it still had its hard-line elements and
Žižek was fired in 1973 because his MA dissertation was deemed to
be ‘non-Marxist’. He spent the next four years in the Yugoslav
national army, completing his obligatory national service. In the
late 1970s he was hired as a researcher at the Institute of
Sociology at the University of Ljubljana, enabling him to complete a
PhD on German idealism in 1981. He then studied psychoanalysis in
Paris with Jacques
*Lacan's son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, and
completed his habilitation thesis (on Lacan, Hegel,
and Marx). Outside of academia, Žižek co-founded the Slovenian
Liberal Democratic Party and in 1990 stood for a seat in the
four-member collective Slovenian presidency and only narrowly missed
gaining office.
The publication of The Sublime
Object of Ideology in 1989, Žižek's first work in English,
was the major launching point of his career. It set the pattern for
his numerous future publications by applying a mixture of Lacan and
Hegel to a basically Marxist problematic: what is ideology
and how does it work? Žižek defines ideology as the set of beliefs
which glue society together—these beliefs are often false,
inconsistent and irrational, but no less necessary for being so. For
example, money requires our belief in its value—it is literally a
promissory note—to function, in spite of the fact that our senses
tell us it is intrinsically worthless. The point is, even though we
know better, even though we know the truth, we act as though the
truth were otherwise, and this leads Žižek to propose the
provocative thesis that it is fantasy
that supports reality (and not the other way round). Fantasy is a
conscious disavowal of a known truth coupled with an unconscious
(and therefore stronger) belief in an alternate truth. Fantasy is
faced constantly by the threat of dissolution should it come into
contact with the real,
therefore culture
must find ways of staving off that eventuality. Žižek's best work
details how this process works and fails at the same time.”
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